In the ongoing culture war about gender, there are two clearly defined sides. A binary, if you will. One side believes that biological sex, unlike gender, is innate and immutable. The other side believes that gender, unlike biological sex, is innate and immutable. Both sides are very loud. They’re also both wrong.
Why are they wrong? First of all, whilst biological sex may be innate, it certainly isn’t immutable. Anyone who has viewed medical transition up close can testify to this. About six months into my ex’s transition, she smelled different. Her anatomy functioned differently, which is frankly why I don’t give credence to fears about rapists undergoing long-term HRT gaining access to female spaces. And good grief, her personality changed. She went from an unhappy, argumentative man to a full-on Queen Bitch. There was a lot more to it than ‘a man in a dress’.
Second of all, gender is neither innate nor immutable. Whilst some trans people do identify as their chosen gender from a young age, this is simply not true for many trans people I’ve met. I’ve seen gender dysphoria from a tender age, from puberty or early adulthood, from middle age, and from later in life. To try and impose a standard backstory on the phenomenon of gender variance not only flattens the diversity of transgender experience, but is also a reaction to the West’s cultural Christianity rather than a genuine reflection of how and why people choose to medically or socially transition.
So how can one accurately explain gender? Well. It’s a construct, but not in the way that either faction has considered. Put succinctly, it’s a social contract based upon perceived biological sex.
Why does it make a difference framing gender as a social contract? For one thing, it explains why people get angry or defensive when someone in their life chooses to transition. It also explains why trans people get angry or upset when someone in their life misgenders them.
Gender was perhaps the very first social contract ever imposed. Its origins lie in the division of labour surrounding childbirth and rearing. And of course, for as long as this social contract has existed, gender variance has also existed. Although the collection of technologies within medical transition have grown with time, there have always been people who rejected or otherwise lived outside of their imposed social role.
Gender as a social contract also explains why different societies have developed different gender roles. Indeed, one could view the modern trans rights movement as a large-scale attempt to rewrite the Western social contract, with multiple good and bad implications. Though other societies also have trans people, much of the language of liberation has been formulated within the Western cultural context, which perhaps partially explains backlash against trans rights in other parts of the world. Something that advocates for the rights of the gender variant would do well to mull over.
And of course, framing gender as a social contract is also helpful because the concept of human rights is itself a social contract. A social model of gender therefore doesn’t depend upon whether or not gender or biological sex is innate or immutable – it is simply the right of an individual to renegotiate their social contract, just as it’s the right of society to impose its own reasonable parameters on such negotiations.
Sonya Blanck writings 